Before we get started, what’s that popular innovative company that is known for customer obsession?
Amazon 🙂
Customer obsession is basically obsessing with the customers, that’s easy to figure right, but in reality, it means, heavily investing to know the customers more and genuinely putting effort into delighting them.
You will wonder, isn’t everyone building for customers, why is customer obsession a thing?
One big blunder startups commit is to overly believe in how they believe a problem should be solved without carefully understanding how customers will prefer to interact with the solutions.
Achieving a stage of customer obsession requires a lot of customers interaction, data analysis and most importantly a lot of experimentation.
So what do we see to let us know you are customer obsessed:
- You are retention oriented even at the acquisition stage
While the acquisition is very important to even validate that you have a business at all, a customer-obsessed approach is thinking beyond acquisition numbers and actually looking at the planning out journey and experience that will result in customer retention. - You are thorough about each touchpoint of your customer
As a customer-obsessed company, you literally dream of your customers. What is their challenge and how is our product or service going to help them be better. You, therefore, organize the touchpoints thoroughly to fit this. You are not afraid to iterate till it gets there! - Result based over activity-based
Send 20 emails a month or maintain 90% feedback on any amount of email sent monthly if that means sending only 2. Customer obsessed has KPIs around result as against activity. The goal is to always make adjustments that fit the customer, in fact, ‘industry standard’ isn’t the benchmark. - Involving every team in the customer experience process
Creating amazing experiences for customers isn’t only left for the customer success team, but customer-obsessed companies have all teams involved in the process of growth. Each team knows the key KPI they need to jealousy abide by to achieve customer delight. - Customer Feedback
Customer-obsessed companies understand that the most glaring product analytics data are at their best still a guess. They consciously get quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers to merge product data to real experiences to make informed decisions when updating the product, process policies, and protocol. - Constantly Analysing Customer Data Routinely
According to this article by inc.com, up to 73 percent of company data goes unused for analytics. Most startups collect customer data then sit on it and let it gather dust. Each little trend in the purchase, usage, churn, etc needs to be carefully analyzed to understand the challenges of customers, opportunities, and threats.
